I’m facing a weird issue with gmaps and was asked by them on Twitter to ask here.
I’m a “local guide 6” therefore i have quite a lot of reviews given to any kind of businesses but recently i started to receive random emails from maps basically telling me that i am a bot and 5/6 of them will be removed because I breached the rule that says you should not boost positively or negatively a place.
These 5/6 places are different restaurant i have visited in the past,most in the same City and probably 4 5* 1 4*.
I have no affiliation with any business so i don’t get it. Today I even received an email that my appeal was rejected??
Anyone in the same situation? What should I do?
There is no point giving reviews to local businesses if they get removed without any reason!
Thank you
If you want to identify which of your reviews are hidden check this post.
Please use the form called Account investigation for contributions not visible on Google Maps if you believe that some of your contributions have been wrongfully unpublished. Keep in mind, it takes several weeks for the check to be done, and you will not be notified about the result, so I suggest you check the status of your reviews once a week or so.
It would be very helpful if you would use the tagging tool when replying to someone here on Connect. Type @ followed by the username. Type slowly. Then we get an e-mail notification and you are more likely to get a prompt reply. Just hitting Reply does not ensure we get notified by email.
As I can only see your public reviews it is not possible to make conclusions. But your review to S-Mall Park Skawina: “Good place” does not conform with the latest guidelines.
If you want, feel free to share the review text and the Maps links of your 3 latest (and hidden) reviews below for a check. But as is most often the case the spam filter is a bit over sensitive.
Sorry I am not familiar with the usage of this forum.
There were no texts that is the problem I went on my profile and gave ranking to few places i visited in the past as suggested by the app and I believe they were wrongly flagged by a bot or something but it seems impossible to have a human double checking!
Upon checking my profile i found more not published because of “Fake engagement” rule that i wasnt aware of. It doesn’t even make sense.
I didn’t include all the place names but there are few restaurants, one exhaust shop, one battery seller, one car inspection place… I am boosting every local businesses apparently.
Could it be that you review a lot of similar places within a short timeframe? This could be interpreted that you might not have visited the places.
Also, the new review guidelines put a lot of emphasis on avoiding general commentary. I noticed quite a bit of general comments (I already mentioned one example) and very short reviews can also be part of the problem.
You can not conclude that the form is not working because Google decided not to notify us about the result. But there can be a wait of months before they get to release your reviews. I recommend you also use the appeal option for the individual reviews marked as not published in your review contribution list after you improved them.
It would be very helpful if you would use the tagging tool when replying to someone here on Connect. Type @ followed by the username. Type slowly. Then we get an e-mail notification and you are more likely to get a prompt reply. Just hitting Reply does not ensure we get notified by email.
Basically it is a balance between blocking the spammers and not offending too many honest reviewers.
If you need specific help please start a new thread in the HOW-TO section.
@MortenCopenhagen@Thanks for the answer. Sounds very generic and I assume a bigger bug behind. It’s sad that people spend their free time and effort to make the “world a bit better” and that google is not responding. Any personal help desk that you can have checked why I can not post anything anymore?
